F 

*3 0S 



EARLY SHIPPING ON LAKE SUPERIOR 



By JAMES DAVIE BUTLER, LL. D. 



[From Proceedings of State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894] 



MADISON, WIS. 

State Historical Society of Wisconsin 

1895 




Glass TsTsT^ 

Book Bas 



EARLY SHIPl'ING UN LAKE SUPERIOR. 85 



EARLY SHIPPING ON LAKE SUPERIOR. 



BY JAMES DAVIE BUTLER, LL. D. 

[Address delivered at the Forty-second Annual Meeting of the State Historical Society o £ 
Wisconsin, December 13, 1894.] 

Walking down to the oldest piei' in the city of Superior, I 
saw on the right the shattered wreck of a vessel. This ruin- 
ous heap, — ^ keel, keelson, with ribs, as well as something of 
stem, stern, and sheathing, — I was told to be all that remained 
of the "Algonquin," an old-timer which some people believed 
the first decked vessel that had reached the head of the lake. 

This amphibious mass, lying half on land and half on water, 
I perceived to be highly prized as a quarry of curios. The 
rusting spikes had tinged the water-logged oak with charming 
tints, and hence canes, chairs, and tables had been fashioned 
out of the hulk. Seeing these things, full both of associations 
and of intrinsic beauty, I quoted Shakespeare : 

'* Nothing of it that doth fade, 
But hath suffered a sea change, 
Into something rich and strange." 

What manner of vessel the "Algonquin" had been, where she 
hailed from, when she was built, and when she perished, were 
questions I found no one to answer. 

Fortunately one of my friends in Detroit had been early in 
government employ on the great lake. By writing him I found 
what I sought, — that he had seen the "Algonquin" on the 
first day of June, 18-iO, at the Soo, ' where she had just been 
dragged over the portage on ways and rollei's. She was a 
schooner of about sixty tons, built in Lorain, a town about 
twenty miles west of Cleveland, by the Ohio Fishing and Mining 
Company in 1839. 

' Modern popular name for the Sault Ste. Marie, connecting Lakes Supe- 
rior and Huron. — Ed. 



86 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

The first M'ethodist missionary, Pitezel, relates ^ that iu the 
fall of 184-4 he had hoped to sail up the lake on the "Algonquin," 
but learned at the Soo that she had been chartei'ed for carry- 
ing supplies to Fort Wilkins — a post which had been estab- 
lished at Copper Harbor the summer before. 1 find an account 
of the "Algonquin," which from 1845 was commanded by Capt. 
John McKay, who finally bought her as an active agent in de- 
veloping the settlement and commerce of Lake Superior. Ac- 
cording to a statement by the captain's son, her dimensions 
were fifty-four feet in length, twenty-six feet beam, five feet in 
depth of hold, ribs five by six inches spaced thirteen inches 
apart with one and a half inch planking. These figures may 
enable experts to estimate her real tonnage, which is variously 
stated: Steere says 50 tons, Hubbard 60, and Houghton 70. 

In 1853 she became the fishing smack of Captain Davis, and 
nearly a decade after died of old age. Growing leaky, she was 
abandoned, and sank not far from where her remains now lie. 
According to Voltaire, when men die old their death is not much 
noticed, in fact they scarcely notice it themselves. So fared it 
with the "Algonquin." Age is thrown into unregarded cor- 
ners. My inquiries about her had scarcely begun when I ascer- 
tained that she was by no means the first decked vessel on Lake 
Superior. Others came to my knowledge which were there be- 
fore her — not only in 1835, and then in 1823, but in 1815 and 
even in the first decade of our century. The next surprise was^ 
ascertaining that a bark of 95 tons had crossed the great lake 
many a time before the year 1800, and sometimes ten times in 
a single year. Nor was this all. In 1785 a schooner had ar- 
rived at the Soo for passing up the rapid, while another had 
been built above that descent in 1771, and yet another forty 
years earlier, or about 1731. " In the lowest deep, a lower 
deep." In view of jsuch disclosures one is ready to exclaim: We 
may next expect that the first land on which the ark of Noah 
rested will turn out to be the shore of Lake Superior, which 
geologists agree is the oldest spot on the face of the earth. 

All sailing vessels on our grandest lake, during the last cen- 

' John H. Pitezel's Lights and Shades of Missionary Life (Cincinnati, 
1883),p. 61.— Ed. 



EARLY SHIPPING ON LAKE SUPERIOR. 87 

tury and the first four decades of the present, owed their exist- 
ence to fur. Throughout that period fur was king, and pre- 
eminently on that innermost lal^e. Hence, as early as 1(379 
DuLhut was already a fur-dealer on the site of the city which 
now bears his name.' There he feared no English or other 
rival. There he covild laugh at restrictions which fettered 
traders in Canada. There furs were best and prices lowest. 

"We cease to wonder that the furor for fur was born so early 
and lived so long, when we glance at the career of the Hudson's 
Bay Company, which was incorporated in 1670. Their price cur- 
rent for a beaver, when brought to their posts, was a quart of 
brandv. much watered; or, if preferred, a dozen needles, or 
twenty flints, or four fire-steels. What they thus bought they 
sold at such rates that for a hundred years their dividends 
never fell below sixty per cent. They realized the best specu- 
lation imagined b}'' poets, which is: 

" To buy a fool up at the price he is worth, 
And sell him for that which he puts on himself." 

No modern speculator has better understood the three ground 
rules of success, namely, multiplication, division, and silence. 
Their watchword was "Mum." Hence, nothing in my research 
has been so hard as to ascertain what the Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany accomplished in ship-building on our grandest lake. 

The earliest builder of a vessel on Lake Superior, with sails 
larger than an Indian blanket, whose name has been discovered 
in the New Dominion archives at Ottawa, was La Ronde, a 
Frenchman, who about 1731 had already constructed at his own 
expense a bark of forty tons, though he was obliged to trans- 
port the rigging and other materials as far as the Soo in canoes.'^ 
His reward was the monopoly of the fur trade at La Pointe — 
the only post on the south shore of the lake for a century after- 
ward. He thus became an autocrat there. Madelaine island, 
on Benin's map, issued at Paris in 1745, is printed "Isle de La 
Ronde. " 

No doubt the Catholic church helped La Ronde in his ship- 
building, for he would give missionaries a free passage to an 

' Parkman's La Salle, p. 257. 

- Minnesota Historical Society Collections, v., p. 425. 



88 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

inviting field — the asylum where their converts, when driven 
from Lake Simcoe by Iroquois, had found tlie safest refuge. He 
must also have been helped by some of those French who were 
then sanguine of success in opening a short-cut to China 
through the most western of mediterranean lakes. From that 
point, in 1722, Charlevoix tried hard to adventure to the Pa-' 
cific. Others may have aided him as a prospector for copper, 
surface indications of which, and indeed Esheol clusters, were 
abundant in his domain. In 1740 La Ronde was sick, and went to 
Montreal. In 1747 his son is mentioned as on his way to his 
father's western post. 

It is a pity we know no more concerning the fates and for- 
tunes of the pioneer sloop. But if its career was as long as the 
"Algonquin's," it did not come to its end before companions of 
its own class had been launched on the same water. About 
176G, Capt. Jonathan Carver spent a year in coasting Lake 
Superior. He states that "the Fi^ench, while they were in 
possession of Canada, had kept a small schooner on this lake. " * 
In the Calendar of Canadian Archives we have a notice of the 
loss of this vessel, soon after the conquest of Canada in 17(3.- 
Agents now at work in Paris, as the New Dominion archivist 
writes me, may probably find what we so long for, regarding 
the earliest of white man's vessels on the innermost of lakes. 
La Salle's sloop, the "Griffin," launched just above Niagara in 
1G70, was never heard of after that year. The French never 
built another vessel on Lake Erie. Upon the uppermost lake 
fur was of a better quality and far more plentiful, and trade 
safer from both English rivals and Indian hostiles. They 
therefore chose to build on Superior, and not on Erie. The date 
of the earliest launch in Deti'oit was 17G9, and that by English. 

Within less than a decade after the British had mastered 
Lake Superior, another decked vessel was launched on its north 
shore at Point aux Pins, This point, where La Ronde and other 
French seem to have had their ship-yards, is seven miles above 
the Soo. One Henry Baxter had gone over to London, re- 
enforcing the reports of Carver with such stories about virgin 

' Carver's Travels, p. 134. 

* Calendar of Canadian Archives, 1888, p. 64. 



EARLY SIIirriNG ON LAKE SUPERIOR. 89 

copper, and such specim(>ns of that mineral, that a comj^any was 
there formed which furnished money for mining. Eai'ly in 1770, 
Baxter and his money-bags were at the Soo. He joined with 
Alexander Henry, a trader from New Jersey, as well as Boston 
agents and partners, who composed a company for working Su- 
pei-ior mines. In August, 1770, they laid the keel of a sloop of 
70 tons, and during the following winter finished a barge. 
Henry says: "Early in May, 1771, we departed [in our barge] 
from our ship-yard three leagues from the Soo. We crossed to 
the south side of the lake, and coasted westward till we reached 
the Ontonagon, where we landed miners and arranged every- 
thing for their accommodation during the winter, and i^eturned 
to the Soo."' In the spring of 1772 the southern mine had 
caved in and was abandoned. Henry continues: "In August, 
1772, we launched our sloop and carried miners to the copper 
ore on the north side of the lake. In 1773 we carried them as 
far as the river Pic [which is half way to Port Arthur] and 
sent copper to England, but the partners declined entering into 
further expenses. So in 1774 Mr. Baxter disposed of the 
sloop. "- 

The failure of this enterprise is ascribed by the best authori- 
ties not to any mismanagement, but to the extreme difficulties of 
forwarding supplies, especially provisions, to the miners. But 
that the project was born out of due time, would at all events 
have been soon demonstrated by what Carver calls " the dis- 
tracted situation of affairs " — meaning the outbreak of the Revo- 
lutionary War. No doubt the sloop fell into the hands of fur 
traders who well knew the value of such a craft for their busi- 
ness, and some of whose firms may already have made more than 
one vessel as large, regarding which no chronicle remains. How- 
ever this may be, nine years after Baxter's -sale, when the North- 
west Fur Company was organized in 1783, one of their first 
endeavors was to secure a decked vessel on the chief lake. 
With this view, in 1784, they petitioned the military governor 
of Canada for permission to build a vessel at Detroit, to be sent 
early in the spring to the Soo, for the purpose of getting her 

' Travels and Adventures of Alexander Henry, pp. •226-234. 
-Ibid. 



go WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

up the falls and to be employed on Lake Superior. They showed 
that canoes could not supply their demands, but that a lai'ge 
vessel was needed to carry merchandise and provisions to the 
Grand Portage/ and was indispensable for the prosecution of 
their trade in furs." 

Their petition was promptly granted, and a schooner named 
the " Beaver " was at once constructed. Her dimensions were, 
keel thirty-four feet, beam thirteen, and hold four feet; cost 
£1,843 13s 2d. She arrived at the foot of the Soo in May, 
1785. For some unexplained reason, however, it proved impos- 
sible to bring her then over the portage.^ 

But no doubt the " Beaver " was either brought over another 
season, or some similar craft was very soon prepared. For such 
a vessel became a necessity immediate and constant. The head- 
quarters of the Northwest Company were established about 
thirty miles west of Port Arthur. The spot was called G-rand 
Portage because by a land-carriage of nine miles from that ^ooint 
goods reached navigable water on Pigeon river. Through this 
stream, and others interlocking, they could be transported in 
canoes to multitudinous posts, many of which — thanks to felici- 
tous positions — could intercept Indian trade which had before 
gone to Hudson's Bay. But in order to equip these posts the 
same year, merchandise must arrive at Grand Portage by mid- 
summer. For this purpose, the utmost dispatch was demanded 
in the transit from the Soo. Otherwise goods forwarded from 
Montreal at the opening of navigation could not be brought to 
their mai'ket till the close of the second season. Manifestly they 
needed something which could bestride the waves like a colossus, 
when shallow bauble boats of weak, untimbered sides, that did 
not fly to harbor, became a toast for Neptune. 

We have a description of such a vessel which in the last year 
of last century was, it may be, already a dozen years old. Har- 
mon, a Vermont boy who had enlisted in the fur company's serv- 
ice, had made his way to the Soo in thirty-three days from Mont- 

^ See W^is. Hist. Colls., xi., pp. 123-125, for historical sketch of Grand 
Portage. — Ed. 

^ Cal. Canad. Arch., 1888, pp. G4-72. 
3 Id., 1890, p. 50. 



EARLY SHIPPING OX LAKE SUPERIOR. QI 

real, on the last of May, 1800. He there at Pine Point in- 
spected the company's vessel and was informed by the captain 
that she would carry as many as ninety-five tons, and that she 
made four or five trips to Gi'and Portage every season. A saw- 
mill at the Soo was preparing lumber for her to transport, and 
a canal had been cut on the Canadian side so that loaded canoes 
might need no portage for conveying their freight to the vessel.' 
In 1798 the Northwest Company had had a British garrison for a 
decade at Grand Portage; they had in their pay 1,205 employes; 
and as no crops were raised at their posts they were forced to 
carry food as well as other supplies over the lake — an additional 
proof that they must have early pi'ovided on that water a vessel 
with larger sails than Indian blankets. The crowning proof, 
however, lies in the fact that such a vessel — named the "Speed- 
well " — was afloat there in 1789, and flying the flag of their most 
formidable competitor, the Hudson's Bay Company. ^ 

The rivalry of competing coi"porations is now fierce, but it is 
tame compared with that of the clashing fur companies. For 
their thrusts and counter-thrusts I find no parallel, save in the 
odium theologicum between the Greek and Latin churches. In 
their ecclesiastical antagonism it is reported that when one 
party was proud of a skull of Peter, a twelve-year-old fisher boy, 
the other produced the skull of the selfsame Peter, full grown 
and chief of the apostles. It could not have been long after the 
Hudson's Bay men hoisted their banner on the "Speedwell " be- 
fore she encountered a foeman worthy of her steel, and battling 
for the Northwesters. A proverb declares : 

" Where'er for God we holy churches rear, 
Beside them Satan's chapels soon appear." 

Which company gave proof of the more devil-wit it would be 
hard to decide. 

During the first years of the nineteenth century, several other 
decked vessels appeared on Lake Superior. At the beginning 
of the year 1812 the Northwesters reported to the Canadian 
government tliat in case of war they would put at its disposal 

^ D. W. Harmon's Journal, p. 37. 

- U. S. Service Mag., ii., p. 458. Article by a medical officer on the lake 
fleet in the War of 1812-15. 



Q2 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

one vessel of 120 tons that could carry six or eight guns, and 
another of 60 tons.' Nor were these two the whole of the 
Superior fleet, for in July, 1814, three others were captured by 
the Americans, namely: the "Perseverance," of 85 tons, the 
schooner " Mink, " of 45 tons, and the sloop "Nancy, " of 38 tons. 
As an indemnity for two of them, £3,500 were paid the company 
by the British government." 

There was yet another schooner on the uppermost lake before 
1812. This was the "Recovery," which through fear of Ameri- 
can privateers was secreted in one of the deep-water canyons at 
the northeast end of Isle Royale. Her spars were taken out, and 
being covered with brushwood she lay undetected until the 
termination of hostilities. Then, put again in commission, she 
was after a while run down the rapids, and under Captain Fel- 
lows she was engaged in the Lake Erie lumber trade. Wrecked 
at last near Fort Erie, opposite Buffalo, her skeleton there was 
long pointed out to strangers.^ 

It is possible that the Northwest Company had no sailing 
vessel on Superior after the war which closed in 1815. An act 
of Congress in 181G, which forbade their doing business within 
the limits of the United States, led them to sell out to John 
Jacob Astor, who styled himself the American Fur Company. 
But their sale may have included more than one vessel. More- 
over, it is certaiia that in 1822 a schooner bearing the British 
ensign was sailing on Lake Superior.^ This vessel was com- 
manded by Lieutenant Bayfield of the British navy, who in 
that year and the next made a far better survey and chart of 
that lake than had been hitherto attempted. This service for 
the admiralty was rewarded by the immediate jDromotion of Bay- 
field, who at length became an admiral; and it is fitly com- 
memorated in the name of a Wisconsin city and county. 

If Astor had bought no decked vessel he probably built one 
soon. His need of such a craft was similar to that of the com- 

' Mich. Pion. Colls., x., p. 68, and Cal. Canad. Arch. 
'^ These three vessels seem to have been at first reserved by the fur 
company for carrying on their business during the war. 

^T. Houghlon, Mineral Region of Lake Superior (Buflfalo, 1840). 
•* Major Long's Expedition, ii., p. 181. 



EARLY SHIPPING ON LAKE SUPERIOR. 93 

party he had supphiutetl. Havino- hired the same men who had 
done the work of the old company, he would naturally adopt 
their methods. The Wisconsin Historical Society has published 
a list of his employes in 1818 and 1819.^ More than one-fifth 
of them appear on that roster as stationed at Fond du Lac — that 
is, operating at posts radiating from the head of Lake Superior. 
Of these fifty-eight Fond du Lac agents, eleven drew salaries of 
f 1,000 or upward. One was paid 12,400. 

In 1834 the timbers and planks for the brig "John Jacob 
Astor " were fashioned at Charlestown, Ohio, and the next 
spring they were carried to the Soo on the schooner "Bridget." 
The keel of the "Astor " was laid above the falls May 17, 1835, 
and she sailed for La Pointe on the 15th of August. She was 
rated at 112 tons, and after nine years was wrecked at Copper 
Harbor in the equinoctial storm of Sept. 21, 1844. It is hard 
to believe that Astor, succeeding to the business of the North- 
west Company, waited well-nigh a score of years before follow- 
ing their example of ship-building, or that his first experiment 
was on so large a scale as his namesake brig. 

In regard to the Hudson's Bay Company's vessels on Superior, 
mention has been made of the " Speedwell " as there in 1789. The 
"Whitefish" was chronicled by Bela Hubbard as at the Soo in 
1840, and she was but two or three years younger than the 
"Astor." The "Elizabeth" and the "Isabel" are described as 
two others of their navy. They are well remembered by the 
older inhabitants of the Soo. 

In 1837 the American Fur Company built the "Madelaine, " of 
about 20 to^is, sailed by Captain Angus, and employed chiefly in 
fishing. Within two years she was stranded at the upper end 
of Minnesota Point. This wreck was much talked of in the 
spring of 183;t, when Vincent Roy first came down St. Louis 
river. The "William Brewster," a schooner of the American 
Fur Company, was of 73 tons and launched in 1838. Her frame 
was prepared in Euclid, Ohio. Having run down the rapids in 
1842, she then saw service on Lake Erie. 

In regard to steam vessels, the " Sam Ward" is ei'roneously 

' Wis. Hist. Colls., xii., p. 170. 



94 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

believed by some to have been the first on our largest lake. The 
truth is, that that craft was not seen there before 1848. It 
seems certain that the first steamer was the "Independence, " 
a propeller of 280 tons. It was 1845 when she first arrived in 
Copper Harbor. This propeller's maximum speed in good 
weather was four miles an hour. In the same year in which 
she had been drawn over the portage, Vincent Roy came in her 
to La Pointe, which she reached November 1, 1845. 

In 1846, another steamer, also of 280 tons, the " Julia Palmer, " 
appears. According to Judge Steere, her bones ai'e still visible 
some eight miles west of Point Iroquois. In that year, 1846, the 
census of the Lake Superior navy, as made by Jacob Houghton, 
was as follows: Nine sail vessels, namely — three of seventy 
tons, "Algonquin," " Swallow," " Merchant; " four of forty tons, 
"Uncle Tom," "Chippewa," "Fur Trader," "Siskowit; " one of 
fifty tons, the "Whitefish. " 

Two years earlier, in 1844, mining had begun in earnest, an 
industry which multiplied both steamers and sail vessels. It 
was, however, the completion of the ship canal at the Soo, 
opened May 21, 1855, — and pre-eminently the deeper canal of 
1881, — which broke down the barrier between sea-going ships 
and our central sea. In 1883, the completion of the railway 
from the Pacific to Duluth first made Lake Superior the mediter- 
ranean highway of commerce from farthest West to farthest East. 
Now the last and greatest need, the one thing needful, is deep 
waterways — the Toronto international convention's end and 
aim. 

We mark the advance of navigation on Lake Superior as we 
contrast the "Beaver," I have described as built in 1784, and 
the " Northwest, " built a century and a decade later. The 
former's keel was thirty-four feet, the latter's length was 400, 
wanting one rod; thirty-four feet was the depth of one, the other's 
was four; the ancient vessel cost $9,000, the modern a hundred 
times more; the one could give no real accommodation to a 
single passenger, the other could carry 400 amid more tasteful 
surroundings than I have discovered in most Old World palaces. 
Last summer I was in such a company from end to end of the 
great lake. As to electrics, the "Northwest " surpassed every 



EARLY SHIPPING ON LAKE SUPERIUR. 95 

one of the three and twenty sea-going steamers which had borne 
me around the terraqueous globe. In no point was it far be- 
hind ocean gi-ey-hounds. On the Inland Sea of Japan, the 
" Kobi Maru " pleased me so well that I long(>d to imitate Peter 
Schlemihl, who clapped whatever took his fancy into a magic 
purse, and when he had need took it out again. So I threatened 
the captain that I would purse vip his ship and crew for launch- 
ing on all oceans I should encounter in rounding the world. 
Happy the traveler who shall carry in his pocket the new- 
crowned empress of our most imperial lake, or who shall traverse 
that lake of lakes encompassed in her arms. 

Furs, alike for their beauty and utility, have been coveted 
the world over and through all ages. They are equally service- 
able for a glory and for a covering, so that nature affords noth- 
ing better to warm a monarch than the fur that has warmed, a 
bear. The finer varieties — beaver, otter, mink, marten, and wild 
cat — were early discovered by the French and their successors 
to be at their fullest and best, as well as easiest to procure, 
either in a ring around Superioi', or in regions to which that 
water was the royal road. It is therefore no wonder that large 
vessels began to be constructed at an early day, and that they 
continued to be fabricated so long as that country continued to 
be the hunter's paradise, whether he sought ermine for judges, 
or sables for settled age or the light and careless livery of 
youth. 

Again, ship-building must needs grow with the growth of 
mining industries, which sprang up in luxuriant life as soon as 
the lacustrine copper and iron treasuries were revealed — the 
richest deposits known. Added to this the discovery of wheat 
oceans westward, balanced by the miraculous movement of coal 
from the east, giving ship-masters assurance of freight both 
ways, have given birth to the witty inventions of the world- 
famous "whale-backs," and raised the tonnage on our chiefest 
lake to more millions than pass through the Suez canal, that 
conflux of commerce from all the continents. The exports alone, 
the current season, ai-e valued at more than a hundred and fifty 
millions. 

After all, iron and copj^er mining on Lake Superior — tributary 



g6 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

ao-riculture westward, and coal-digging eastward — ai-e still in 
their infancy. The greatest is behind. When they have done 
their perfect work, what shall Superior navigation become? It 
must be something worthy of that lake's peerless magnitude and 
felicitous position — at once the key to both oceans, and the 
bond of perfectness to unify them both. We see much, but we 
see only 

" The baby figure of a giant mass 
Of things to come at large," 

which in the r seeds and weak beginnings lie intreasured. 



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